A key to successful issue campaigns is power – understanding who has it and knowing what those with power find persuasive. This is a point made the “Peter Onear” in the January 18 “Party Line” column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Onear, the “pseudonym of a vice president for government relations at a university in the Midwest,” makes the case that local county officials – “invisible government” – can be critical to the success of a university. In this case they can help draw private-sector investment dollars to campus and hopefully eventually pay for a parking lot.
Too often advocates either assign power to too many people (all of congress), misplace it (voters or the press, when what they really mean are legislators who respond to voters or the press) or don’t think about it at all (hold events, send out press releases, build coalitions and otherwise create a stir without clearly thinking through at whom the stir is directed and how those they need to reach will respond to being the objects of the stir).
In some cases advocates know who has power but don’t account for it. I have worked with several state-based groups advocating for legislative change that the governor opposed. In both cases the advocates knew of the governor’s opposition, and either failed to come up with a strategy for it or simply went ahead anyway. Not surprisingly, in both cases the efforts failed.
Power is the person or people who can either make your goal happen or stop it from happening. It is the person who issues the order, signs the check or casts the tying vote. Power is your audience. In a classroom there is an audience of one: the professor. On the FCC there is an audience of one or two: the swing votes needed to construct a three person majority. In Congress it is often a Committee Chair, Ranking Member or member of leadership. Power is almost never all the students in a class, all five members of the FCC or all 435 US Representatives.
The best campaigns, be they for parking lots, changes to media ownership rules or good grades, are directed at that handful of people who have power. These campaigns learn how and what power thinks about the issue, and runs directly at it. Persuasion is about the person who needs to be persuaded, not the ones doing the persuading or those who either can’t reach or don’t have power.
Press conferences, ads, coalitions, web pages, and so on are all means to reach power. Only after learning where power is and what moves power on the issue at hand should an organization take out a single ad or send out a single press release. Leaping before looking not only risks wasting resources, it runs the risk of alienating exactly those people you need to win.
